APPLEGATE: U.S. not founded as Christian nation

With the Fourth of July approaching, we continue to hear from some that this is a “Christian” country, and they point to the words “Nature’s God,” “Creator,” and “Divine Providence,” which are found in the Declaration of Independence, as proof.

It is important to understand, however, that these words are not an endorsement of Christianity. Ironically, the words used by Thomas Jefferson represented a significant defeat for organized religion in general and traditional Christianity in particular, in that the Declaration completely disenfranchised the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible in favor of a deistic deity — “Nature’s God.”

These men advocated a natural religion based on human reason rather than divine revelation. They affirmed the existence of a Creator-God, but repudiated the idea he meddled or intervened with the laws of nature or with matters of humankind on Earth. Most importantly, like Jefferson, they denied the divinity of Jesus. Simply put, these men believed in “Nature’s God,” and they said so in the Declaration of Independence.

Look at Jefferson’s words. Does the Declaration mention Jesus, Christianity, the Bible or the Ten Commandments? It does not. Do the words “In God We Trust” or the phrase “One Nation under God” appear anywhere? They do not. In all its 1,250 words, Christian scriptural language and theology never invade the Declaration’s pages.

Jefferson’s un-Christian verbiage, however, didn’t go unchallenged. When this historic document was being written, the clergy vociferously lobbied the Declaration committee to include some recognition of Christianity, but no specific references to Christian practices or beliefs were forthcoming from the framers. By Jefferson invoking “Nature’s God,” it made clear that the Declaration of Independence was not a Christian document.

This document elevated nature, science and human reason over ecclesiastical monkishness and represented a victory for the “rights of man,” and for “state-church separation.”

This is not to suggest our founders, including Jefferson, were godless men or intrinsically irreligious; they were not. Many of them, however, were not Christians, especially the more influential ones like Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Franklin and Thomas Paine. They were either Unitarians or deists.

Few people have ever captured the importance and essence of the Declaration of Independence as well as Robert Ingersoll, who wrote: “With one blow, with one stroke of the pen, they struck down all the cruel, heartless barriers that aristocracy, that priest craft, that Kingcraft had raised between people, with one word, with one blow, they wiped away and destroyed, all that had been done by centuries of war-centuries of hypocrisy-centuries of injustice. They laid down the doctrine that governments were instituted among men for the purpose of preserving the rights of the people. This Declaration, uncrowned Kings; it gave the peasant a career; it knighted all the sons of toil; it opened the path of opportunity, and put the star of hope above the cradle of a poor man’s child.”

The certificate of independence so thoughtfully and carefully crafted by Jefferson in 1776 marked the beginning of the end of the religious state and the emergence of the secular state based on the “consent of the governed,” rather than on the revealed word of any deity.

It’s interesting to note that just before Jefferson’s death he wrote a final letter stating that the Declaration he authored was in part, not only to declare our independence from England, but also to free us from the chains of religious oppression that had helped to destroy Europe.

The most powerful argument against the notion of the U.S. as a Christian country is the Constitution itself. How can America be a Christian country when our Constitution specifically prohibits the government from establishing or endorsing one religion over another religion?

America as a country is no more a Christian country than it is a Muslim, Hindu or an atheist one. We are one country under a secular Constitution!

Borden Applegate, of Jackson, retired as a major with the Jackson Police Department.